by John Lahr
Williams had liberated his desire, only to be lumbered by appetite. “I ache with desires that never are quite satisfied,” he wrote. “This promiscuity is appalling really. One night stands. Nobody seems to care particularly for an encore.” He added, “Still waiting for the big thing to come along.” Sex, he was learning, was a way of discharging aggression. Love didn’t enter into the equation. “The big emotional business is still on the other side of tomorrow,” he wrote. “That’s why I’m restless. Maybe tropical sunlight—or moonlight—would stir something up that I’m in need of. Shit.” By mid-1940, “this awful searching-business of our lives” was no easier for Williams. “My emotional life has been a series of rather spectacular failures,” he wrote in his diary. “Last night was the grand anti-climax—Ah, l’amour, la guerre et la vie!! When will it happen—and how?” He added, “Haggard, tired, jittery, fretful, bored—that is what lack of a reciprocal love object does to a man. Let us hope it spurs his creative impulse—there should be some compensation for this hell of loneliness. Makes me act, think, be like an idiot—whining, trivial, tiresome.” He scrawled in his notebook, “You coming toward me—please make haste! J’ai soif! Je meurs de soif!”
Williams in the flesh, 1943
Williams soon took to his new lifestyle like a bass to a top-water lure. Once he was fortified by a few drinks, his congenital shyness evaporated. “His practice in a room of half a dozen more or less presentable males was to make a pass at the one he found most attractive and then, if it was not successful, to go on down the line,” Windham recalled. Windham continued, “If none of these approaches was successful, there were still the showers and steam rooms at the Y.” Williams recalled cruising Times Square with Windham. “He would dispatch me to street corners where sailors or GIs were grouped, to make very abrupt and candid overtures, phrased so bluntly that it’s a wonder they didn’t slaughter me on the spot,” Williams wrote. “Sometimes they mistook me for a pimp soliciting for female prostitutes and would respond ‘Sure, where’s the girls?’—and I would have to explain that they were my cruising partner and myself. Then, for some reason, they would stare at me for a moment in astonishment, burst into laughter, huddle for a brief conference, and, as often as not, would accept this solicitation, going to my partner’s Village pad or to my room at the Y.” According to Windham, during these early wolfish years, Williams’s “quotidian goal was to end up in bed with a partner at least once before the twenty-four hours was over.”
In less than fifteen months, Williams went from prude to lewd. “I was just terribly over sexed, baby, and terribly repressed,” Williams told Playboy. “I’m getting horny as a jack-rabbit,” he wrote to Windham in October 1940, from the arid confines of the family home, where, ironically, his mother and grandmother—“the most uncompromising of southern Puritans . . . seem to believe it my sacred and peculiar mission to eliminate sex from the modern theatre.” He went on, “So line up some of that Forty-second Street trade for me when I get back!” Once in New York, in his diaries, the image of satyr alternated with that of a sad sack. From a man-child unwilling even to touch himself, he had progressed to “deviant Satyriasis,” as he referred to his sexual rampage. “Sexuality is an emanation, as much in the human being as the animal,” he said. “Animals have a season for it. But for me it was a round-the-calendar thing.”
“I went out cruising last night and brought home something with a marvelous body,” he wrote to Paul Bigelow. “It was animated Greek marble and turned over even. It asked for money and I said, Dear, would I be living in circumstances like this if I had any money?” Sometimes, Williams’s lovers were startled by the beating of Williams’s own hungry heart. “I am always alarming bed partners by having palpitations,” he wrote. “Tonight my pulse was taken by the alarmed guest and it was counted ‘over 100.’ Considerably over I guess. I am so used to it it doesn’t disturb me except when it makes me breathless. Well, tonight was worth palpitations. An almost ideal concurrence of circumstances and a record for me of 5 times perfectly reciprocal pleasure.”
“As the world grows worse it seems more necessary to grasp what pleasure you can, to be selfish and blind, except in your work,” he wrote to Windham. In his romantic imagination, this was a belief that would develop into something like a full-blown religion. “I’d like to live a simple life—with epic fornications,” he wrote in 1942. “I think for a good summer fuck you should cover the bed with a large white piece of oil-cloth,” he wrote the same year. “The bodies of the sexual partners ought to be thoroughly, even superfluously rubbed over with mineral oil or cold cream. It should be in the afternoon, preferably soon after lunch when the brain is dull. . . . It should be a bright, hot day, not far from the railroad depot and the scene of the fornication should be a Victorian bedroom at the top of the house with a skylight letting the sun directly down on the bed. . . . If the sexual partner is a southern belle with intellectual pretensions and a beautiful ass, it must be plainly told where the charm is concentrated and urged to keep the loftier cerebral processes out of the picture at least till after the first ejaculation. This little item is from my Mother’s Recipe Book, on the page for meat dishes.”
However, whenever Williams’s lecherous smile was met with cold teeth, he grew dispirited. “I cruised with 3 flaming belles for a while on Canal Street and around the Quarter,” he wrote in 1941. “They bored and disgusted me so I quit and left Saturday night to its own vulgar, noisy devices.” Sometimes, Williams met not with pleasure but with violence. “Tonight ran into some ‘dirt’ at the Polynesian bar—for the first time in my life I was struck—not hard enough to hurt anything but my spirit,” he wrote. “Close shave. Returned to the safety of ‘James’ Bar’ where I met the companion of last night and we resumed our cruising—again fruitless for me.”
IN YOU TOUCHED ME! Williams wrote of “unspent tenderness” growing and growing “until it gets to be something enormous. Then finally there is so much of it. It explodes inside them—and they go to pieces.” He knew the feeling. “When I now appear in public, the children are called indoors and the dogs pushed out!” he wrote to a friend in 1941. “My cumulated sexual potency is sufficient to blast the Atlantic fleet out of Brooklyn. . . . I have never felt quite so rape-lusty.” In a sense Williams’s promiscuity served as a sort of powerful antidepressant; it provided a sense of external adventure to a life that seemed to him internally stalled. In his poem “The Siege,” written in the early forties, Williams, who did not like or trust his body, described his blood as mercury, an unstable element that can’t hold its shape and needs to be contained:
Sometimes I feel the island of my self
a silver mercury that slips and runs
revolving frantic mirrors in itself
beneath the pressure of a million thumbs.
Then I must that night go in search of one
unknown before but recognized on sight
whose touch, expedient or miracle,
stays panic in me and arrests my flight.
As the poem suggests, Williams didn’t seem to know just what was inside him—and he needed to be inside someone else in order to piece together his fragmented self. “I always want my member to enter the body of the sexual partner,” Williams said. “I’m an aggressive person, I want to give, and I think it should be reciprocal.” His sexual delirium had about it a sense of both panic and primness. “In his room, amid the disordered contents of his suitcase and footlocker trunk, he kept, besides a jar of Vaseline, a bottle of Cuprex, against crabs, and a tube of prophylactic salve, against gonorrhea. A small drawstring bag, like the bags cigarette tobacco was sold in then, accompanied the tube of salve, to tie around his genitals and protect his clothing when he dressed after the salve was applied,” Windham wrote of Williams during his prowling days at the Y. He added, “When he was not on the make and trying to charm, his behavior frequently suggested that he had never been part of any family, and certainly never under the supervision of a punctilious mother wh
o was a Regent of the D.A.R.—Daughters of the American Revolution.” On the contrary, like Williams’s habit of sucking his teeth, licking his lips, and eating when he pleased—“I think I have gone as far toward release from dogmatic strictures as anyone goes,” he confided to his diary—promiscuity was another way of forgetting home and its deadly climate of repression.
Williams, who often complained of feeling like a ghost, had himself become a denizen of the night. The night eroticized his sense of absence, that oppressive emptiness he had carried with him since childhood. “Evening is the normal adult’s time for home—the family,” he observed in his diary in 1942, already aligning himself with the sexual renegades. “For us it is the time to search for something to satisfy that empty space that home fills in the normal adult’s life. It isn’t so bad, really. Usually we go home with nothing. Now and then we succeed.” Cruising was some dream-like odyssey of reclamation, as Tom says in The Glass Menagerie, “to find in motion what was lost in space.” A large part of its addictive thrill was in being chosen; it gave an emotional lift to Williams’s deflated self. He began to see sex as “spiritual champagne,” and the Rx for his blues.
The excitement of pickups—“the asking look in his eyes”—turned tables on his hunger. (“You coming toward me—please make haste! . . . (You—you—is this you?—‘Coming toward me?’)”) By being desired, Williams was emptied of need; the stranger became the needy one. In that sense, Williams’s cruising held the promise of another kind of emotional relief—each time it succeeded, he had been chosen, he had been taken in, he knew he was real. Having rejected his mother’s Puritan strictures, his Christian faith, his “normal” self, he embraced homosexuality’s “rebellious hell,” and with it, he claimed his animality. “I know myself to be a dog, but—animal nature no longer appears embarrassing in one’s self,” he wrote. “It has become so universally apparent in others.” “I wonder, sometimes, how much of the cruising was for the pleasure of my cruising partner’s companionship and for the sport of pursuit and how much was actually for the pretty repetitive and superficial satisfactions of the act itself,” Williams wrote of this period. “I know that I had yet to experience in the ‘gay world’ the emotion of love, which transfigures the act to something beyond it.”
IN JUNE 1940, “at the nadir of my resources, physical, mental, spiritual,” Williams took himself off to the artsy enclave of Provincetown, Massachusetts—“P-Town,” as it was called, an abbreviation that to Williams stood for “pilgrimage” in “mad pilgrimage of the flesh.” To his friends, he reported that life there was “beautiful and serene”; the result of a regimen that included “taking free conga lessons, working on a long, narrative poem, swimming every day, drinking every day, and fucking every night.” On one of those days, in a two-story shack on Captain Jack’s Wharf, which sat on stilts above the ebb and flow of the tide, Williams caught a glimpse of Kip Kiernan, to whom he would dedicate his first book of stories and whose pictures he would carry in his wallet until it was lost in the sixties. Kiernan, born Bernard Dubowsky, was a Canadian draft dodger who had invented a new name for himself and a new life in art. He and his roommate, Joe Hazan, who would become a confidant of Williams, had ambitions to be dancers; both took beginners’ classes at the Duval School of Ballet and then switched on partial scholarships to the American School of Ballet in Provincetown. “Neither of us had any talent at all in ballet,” Hazan said, adding of Kip, “He just didn’t have it. He wasn’t meant to be a dancer. He’d studied sculpture some place before.”
To Williams, Kip was sculpture. His well-proportioned muscular torso may have made him top-heavy as a dancer, but it made him perfect as an erotic ideal. “My good eye was hooked like a fish,” Williams wrote. (He had a cataract in one eye at the time.) “I will never forget the first look I had at him, standing with his back to me at the two-burner stove, the wide and powerful shoulders and the callipygian ass such as I’d never seen before! He didn’t talk much. I think he felt my vibes and was intimidated by my intensity.” Among the accessories to this splendid body were, according to Williams, “slightly slanted lettuce-green eyes, high cheekbones, and a lovely mouth.” “When he turned from the stove, I might have thought, had I been but a little bit crazier, that I was looking at the young Nijinsky,” Williams wrote; the Nijinsky parallel was one that Kip himself drew later “with Narcissan pride.” A few days later, Williams moved into Kiernan and Hazan’s clapboard bungalow on Captain Jack’s Wharf, sleeping on cots downstairs with Hazan while Kip slept upstairs in the single bedroom. “He had Southern charms, and Kip had a lot of charm,” Hazan remembered. “So it was easy to be friends with him. . . . The experience I had with Kip was that that he had been successful sexually with girls. I never had any indication of homosexuality, not the slightest in any way.”
One July night soon afterward, Williams declared his passion. His “crazed eloquence” silenced Kip for a few moments. Finally, Kip said, “Tom, let’s go up to my bedroom.” In a letter to Windham, Williams set down a unique account of his ravished surrender.
We wake up two or three times in the night and start all over again like a pair of goats. The ceiling is very high like the loft of a barn and the tide is lapping under the wharf. The sky amazingly brilliant with stars. The wind blows the door wide open, the gulls are crying. Oh, Christ. I call him baby . . . though when I lie on top of him I feel like I was polishing the Statue of Liberty or something. He is so enormous. A great bronze statue of antique Greece come to life. But with a little boy’s face. A funny up-turned nose, slanting eyes, and underlip that sticks out and hair that comes to a point in the middle of his forehead. I lean over him in the night and memorize the geography of his body with my hands—he arches his throat and makes a soft, purring sound. His skin is steaming hot like the hide of a horse that’s been galloping. It has a warm, rich odor. The odor of life. He lies very still for a while, then his breath comes fast and his body begins to lunge. Great rhythmic plunging motion with panting breath and his hands working over my body. Then sudden release—and he moans like a little baby. I rest with my head on his stomach. Sometimes fall asleep that way. We doze for a while. And then I whisper “Turn over.” He does. We use brilliantine. The first time I come in three seconds, as soon as I get inside. The next time is better, slower, the bed seems to be enormous. Pacific, Atlantic, the North American continent . . . And now we’re so tired we can’t move. After a long while he whispers, “I like you, Tenny.”—hoarse—embarrassed—ashamed of such intimate speech! And I laugh for I know that he loves me!—That nobody ever loved me before so completely. I feel the truth in his body. I call him baby—and tell him to go to sleep. After a while he does, his breathing is deep and even, and his great deep chest is like a continent moving slowly, warmly beneath me. The world grows dim, the world grows warm and tremendous. Then everything’s gone and when I wake up it is daylight, the bed is empty.—Kip is gone out.—He is dancing.—Or posing naked for artists. Nobody knows our secret but him and me. And now you, Donnie—because you can understand. Please keep this letter and be very careful with it. It’s only for people like us who have gone beyond shame!
In Williams’s description, Kip’s large size is associated with the female (the Statue of Liberty); Williams’s smallness places him in the position of an infant with his gargantuan mother. It’s a connection that Williams makes instinctively—moving directly from the account of Kip’s huge sculpted body to the image of his “little boy’s face.” For Williams, the experience was a movement of both men between the roles of mother and child, culminating in Kip’s surrender to Williams and Williams’s pleasure. “Last night you made me know what is meant by beautiful pain,” Kip told Williams the day after their first night together, as they walked on the dunes. “I know Kip loved me,” Williams wrote. Williams’s restless heart had found its object of desire. “I also know it couldn’t have been very easy to be waked up four or five times a night for repeated service of my desire. One morning he said: ‘
Tenn, I’m too little and you’re too big.’ Well I was not ‘too big’—just sort of parlor-size as they put it in those days—but Kip did have an exceptionally small anal entrance and to be entered that way each night, well, it’s a wonder he didn’t come down with a fistula.”
The dancer Kip Kiernan, his first love
In the midst of this emotional whirlwind, Williams’s old habit of blushing returned, tormenting his days, which he spent translating his riotous emotions—“ecstasy one moment—O dapple faun!—and consummate despair the next”—into the verse drama The Purification. After a while, according to his autobiography Memoirs, “Kip turned oddly moody. . . . We would go places together and he would suddenly not be there, and when he came to bed, after an absence of some hours, he’d explain gently, ‘I had a headache, Tenn.’ ” After a chamber music concert one night, Kip rushed off by himself. “Moves me to find someone afflicted as I am with mental conflicts,” Williams wrote in his diary. “Still it troubles me—this is so much what I need, what I want, what I have been looking for the past few months so feverishly. Seems miraculous. It is too good to be true.” He continued, “I fear his being lost to me already . . . oh, what an ache of emptiness I would have to endure—for now, for the first time in my life, I feel I am near to the great real thing that can make my life complete. Oh, K.—don’t stay away very long.—I’m lonely tonight.” Despite his fears about Kip—“Will it be all gone, will it still be there,” he wrote of Kip’s love on his way back to Provincetown from a quick trip to New York—Williams put on a braggadocio face. “I am being courted by a musician and a dancing instructor and a language professor, one of them has a big new Buick and drives us all over the Cape,” he wrote at the end of July. “They all want Kip but hope to English off me or something since he is apparently less accessible than me—an unmistakable bitch—I think love has made me young again, or maybe it’s the blue dungarees.”